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>> Friday, November 30, 2007

Today, in Holland and Belgium you can buy the new Bright Magazine which is worth mentioning for us because CD-i is featured in a one-page column by Robert van Eijden and a cool futuristic CD-i thumbstick by Dani Montesinos. We were there for the CD-i facts and it's a good read about a 'Disc that nobody wanted', a phrase that might unfortunately be very true ;) - A warm welcome to all of you who arrive here thanks to Bright and maybe you'll find out why CD-i was far ahead of its time, like a lot of topics of the popular Bright Magazine. "Het lijkt erop dat het krakkemikkige CD-i een cultfenomeen wordt. Hoe ironisch: ruim tien jaar na zijn dood is CD-i eindelijk cool."

Surprising new content at two new CD-i initiatives of 2007: Rdjnl's slowly builds his cdi.isgreat.org with more content, now including a start of a hardware section. Below you'll find some more details. Even more interesting you probably already read the response of Terratron about the loss of his CD-i's Technical Archive. Thankfully he is building his third webserver already and there's again room for a CD-i section. Perhaps this Terratron CD-i page will be what cd-i.kick-ass.net never was! Terratron: "Hey guys, a reaction from my side. All of my work was gone when i got a server crash. But the idea of rebuilding the site is still on my mind. see: cd-i.terratron.nl"

Terratron started his CD-i involcement in 2004 with his dutch CD-i Fanclub. Back then he was already busy with hardware articles about CD-i. I hope he has saved these to use with his final website (and let it be a keeper!). Back to rdjnl's cdi.isgreat.org: "Since the launch of this webpage, there have been links on it to our non-existent hardware section. To be honest, I did not intend to create it in the near future. I have to buy a decent digital photo camera first, to make some nice photos that I can put there. However, today I DID make a start with the hardware section. The reason? Recently, I was lucky enough to have the oppertunity to add a nice, rare and properly working item to my collection: a CDI 370 Portable Player." As we love high res pictures of all kind of CD-i stuff, we welcome Rdjnl to show us more photos!

What I also like is his "Hall of Fame and Shame" which includes his favourite and most hated CD-i titles to date. This list is updated regularly and worth checking out from time to time!

>> Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Perhaps a unique opportunity, RW Bivins is planning to sell his complete Oldergames packaging which includes all the publishing rights and prototypes that were in the possession of Oldergames. But does that mean you can buy the originals of Plunderball, Jack Sprite: The Crimson Ghost and Space ranger? Oldergames was also the start of the well-known original Super Mario's Wacky Worlds CD-i prototype. RW Bivins: "All development tools / kits, all contracts for publishing, all products
and catalog ownership, all technologies, all media, our entire archive
of undumped, and unreleased prototypes in included."

I would be interested to know if the rights for the Oldergames released CD-i titles are also included and what kind of documents are available for this. RW Bivins: "Yes. A handshake and a pat on the back from the president of Infogrames. Jack Sprite was also negotiated through it's creator Rob Fulop and Infogrames. They never gave us a contract because this deal was peanuts in their eyes. A lot of our earlier stuff was the typical "deal on a cocktail
napkin" or "on a handshake". Things we do now have full paperwork and contracts. Basically every release we have ever done and the ownership over
the OG brand are included in this deal. As you know we lost the original master
artwork for our CD-i titles a ways back but we do have most high
resolution artwork for our other releases." Get more info here. First potential buyer is Borman, from Past to Present, which sounds like a prefect follow-up to me. Borman: "I've been looking to expand Past to Present, and this would be one key area where I would love to start. Im not in it for just having prototypes or anything, and would definitely seek to keep going what you started."

Two years ago RW Bivins has sold his CD-i development kits including the CD-i prototypes on ebay. So the original CD-i prototypes from OlderGames are already gone! (I believe Glenn the GATOR is the new proud owner). When you keep this in mind, I'm not sure exactly what they have for sale. All development work was outsourced such as Frog Feast and the 3DO encryption. So what does OlderGames actually represent? The remaining question for now: what does this mean for OlderGames relationship with Charles and RasterSoft with the upcoming "Connaone"?

Again it's time for the new poll after choosing the best interactive cartoon on CD-i. Not surprisingly, Brain Dead 13 took the first line and I totally agree this is the best interactive cartoon of all on CD-i. They don't create games like that anymore! And, that also counts for this week's poll:We welcome you to vote for the best FMV Shooter on CD-i. You can vote for 1 or more favourites! Every week we'll spawn a new poll in the left column of this blog: Be quick as the vote limit is only seven days! After the closing day we'll post the results in each catagory post and in the end of December 2007 we'll be back with the final decision to mark "The Best CD-i Game of 2007". I hope you'll all have fun and enjoy CD-i as much as we do! Read on for this weeks nominees:

Starting Date: November 28
End Date: December 5

This week we'll continue with all FMV Shooters released on CD-i. So that's Full Motion Video shooting games, games consisting purely of live video footage, straight from the arcades. The nominees for "Best Game" are:

Crime Patrol
"Be the ultimate crime fighter in this multi-level live action thriller! Streetfight gangs and armed robbers as a rookie. Undercover you'll hit mobsters and drug dealers. SWAT bank robbers and bikers. Make it to the top in Delta Force and take on international terrorists."

Drug Wars - Crime Patrol 2
If it's war you want, it's war you're going to get! Targetting the Drug King Lopez and his entire drug distribution chain is truly an international war. Drug Wars is a multi-level action thriller that will take you through it all. From small town traffickers to big city cartels. You'll fight international drug runners on the border. And, if your shooting skills are good enough, you'll be assigned to South America to destroy the source and capture Lopez.

Last Bounty Hunter, The
So you're the new bounty hunter the whole town's been buzzin' about. You're going to take on these four vicious outlaws and their gangs, huh? Well, stranger. You got that look in your eyes that says you ain't afraid of nothing. That's good, because there's plenty to be afraid of with these four villains.

Mad Dog McCree
There's trouble in old Tucson. Mad Dog McCree and his gang have kidnapped the mayor's daughter and locked up the sheriff. Blaze your way into town, and blast the desperadoes in a classic live action shooting game that takes you right into the streets of the Old West.

Mad Dog McCree 2 - The Lost Gold
Step back into the Old West in this action-packed adventure that pits you against the meanest desperadoes ever to ride that range. Mad Dog's back! And only you can stop him. Choose one of three guides and fight your way through a variety of trails in your quest to find the Lost Gold and return it to the Old Mission where you'll face the longest interactive gun battle ever filmed. Only the fastest guns get to face down Mad Dog McCree and rid the West of the scourge of the territory!

Who Shot Johnny Rock?
Travel back to the thirties in this action-packed gangster whodunit to find out who killed the popular singer star Johnny Rock! You'll need your wits sharp and your gun drawn as you navigate the dark streets of this city looking for clues to help you solve the case. There's danger around every corner and dangerous characters who'd like nothing better than to see you in the morgue!

Interactive Dreams thanks everyone from the CD-i Community to keep CD-i alive!

CD-i member alfantastic just replaced the Timekeeper battery in my 450, marked "MK 48TO8B-15". He discovered this method after wrongly thinking that the cover of the chip could be removed to reveal the crystal and battery, like indicated in this article. "The crystal and battery are actually in a separate casing attached on top of the main chip. They are totally encased inside the casing and cannot be removed from this. The battery is housed at one end of the top casing and the crystal the other. Removing the whole top would indeed gain access to the battery wires but also removes the crystal, which is needed for correct function of the machine. Battery end is to the right side of the writing if read the right way up (hope that makes sense). The top casing is secured with some kind of sealing glue at each end, so slowly and carefully i scraped this off using a scapel blade. Only work on battery end!"

"It took a while as i didn't want to damage the chip underneath. Once i thought i had scraped enough, i used a very thin and small, flatheaded screwdriver to gently prise the lid up. Again only on battery end. In effect this exposed the two battery wires that i needed to solder a new battery to. I used a 3v coin cell and battery holder (for future replacement). I then spread some thick sealing glue over top of chip for protection. As the crystal end didn't need to be prised upwards, it remained connected to the main chip and therefore the machine still functioned. Hope this has helped anyone who is intending to replace the battery themselves. Not easy but possible!"

>> Monday, November 26, 2007

Not announced but it's definately offline. That's two in a row along with CD-i Collective, which is down for months by now. Administrator Omegalfa is nowehere available but thankfully I found the host for an explanation. The site is hosted by DJKoelkast, the owner of another dutch Retro Forum including its own CD-i section. DJKoelkast: "Le Monde runs on my server but Omegalfa owns the content, but it's down at the moment. I have to install new software because the old software wasn't safe. I haven't talked to Omegalfa for a while now so I hope he'll turn up again soon." By now the website tells us "Dear visitor. Because of security issues we are currently offline and working on a solution. Please check regularly." The last real update already was three months old already - More when it develops.

>> Sunday, November 25, 2007

How Grundig got involved in the production of CD-i players is because it used to be part of Philips from around 1990 to 1996. I always wondered why Philips never used the Aristona brand to put budget CD-i players on the market (Like they did with Magnavox), but they put the use of the Grundig brand by producing an OEM version of the Philips 220 and 470 CD-i player. The Grundig family had quite some influence in the contract when Philips came in the picture and it cost Philips a lot of money to get rid of Grundig in 1996, after it wasn't a very profitable company. These Grundig CD-i players were sold in Germany, the home basis of Grundig (It's more popular in Germany than anywhere else). In the end, the grundig CD-i players are identically the same as the Philips versions (all parts are the same).

>> Friday, November 23, 2007

Some of you always come up with the same titles being 'very rare' on CD-i: The Last Bounty Hunter, Creature Shock, The Lost Ride, in fact, every CD-i game released after 1996 is considered rare. Still, I regularly see them on auction sites and I'm surprised how much money you kids pay for these titles. Anyway, I was thinking about what I think is a rare CD-i title, and I can for now only come up with one game: Dark Castle. Now I'm not talking about one of the big box versions (the large box, the grey box) but no: the version released in a regular jewelcase (the last version). I've never seen that one before. The picture above is the one and only picture of the game. I consider this game very rare, along with jewelcase versions of Alien Gate, Lords of the Rising Sun and another very rare jewelcase version of Zombie Dinos: Now who has one of these?

Anonymous insight views of the Philips Sidewalk Studio: "We created 12 CD-i and 2 CD-ROM titles for Philips (some of the CD-i titles were ported to CD-ROM, all were released in multiple languages). Also, we conceived
and executed the rather large project to put movies on CD, first for the
CD-i player (Green Book Standard) and soon after for computers, too
(White Book discs). This was a complex situation that established the
Video CD standard. Let's say this about the project at this time:
If there were, say, 15 things that needed to be done to lead to DVD, we
did 13 of them. What we did not do was enable disc based media to have
enough storage to contain a movie on one disc, while increasing the data
rate (from 1.5 mb to the variable 3-10 mb) so that the movies could look
as good as laserdiscs. That's what DVD did. But Philips, instead of controlling most of the license for DVDs, ended up having 1/15th (or something like that), which
is a shame considering that we had a 3 year lead on the rest of the
world."

"Here's the list in chronological order: Cartoon Jukebox, Sandy's Circus
Adventure, Mother Goose Hidden Pictures, Mother Goose Rhymes to Color,
Richard Scarry's Best Neighborhood Disc, Richard Scarry's Busiest
Neighborhood Disc, Tales from Aesop's Fables, More Tales from Aesop's
Fables, the Wacky World of Miniature Golf, The Berenstain Bears On Their
Own -- And You On Your Own, Surf City, Crayon Factory, The Babysitter's
Club Friendship Kit (CD-ROM only), Story About Me (CD-ROM only). Movie
titles: hundreds (I'm not sure how many) all of which used our Edison
System to turn them out.

The main other production group at Philips was POV, which finished around 8 titles,
although a number of them were ports from CD-ROMs. Beyond that, all the
other producers finished between 1-3 discs during the course of things.
The Funhouse group you mentioned, finished 3 discs using
the animation techniques that Sidewalk invented. BTW, Cartoon Jukebox
was the first disc ever to be finished in the CD-i format; although
others had started earlier (some as many as 2 years earlier), we were
much more organized and got it done relatively quickly.

Philips Media was organized in various ways over its 8 year period. At its most
organized, Games and Children's were the main divisions. Children's did
more titles in-house, Games almost all out-of-house. That's because the
Children's stuff was well managed (mostly by Sidewalk, in my pov) and
figured out the production pathway in a superior fashion. The Games was
poorly managed (in my view) and therefore went outside, except for POV.
POV even was quasi-outside in that it was 45 minutes from headquarters
and was successful because, like Sidewalk, it had strong leadership
apart from the bureaucrats.

The reason that
edutainment was so prominent was because of the very limitations of the
CD-i platform vis a vis computers and other game machines. It was very
difficult to do realtime 3D kinds of games, whereas bit-mapped titles
that children liked took advantage of the platform's strengths. Also,
Sidewalk was so productive, organized, efficient, and budget-conscious
relatively to other groups that they just let us keep creating. And create
we did.

I was approached, as a leading maker of titles,
when MPEG 1 came along to make an interactive movie. But I had my
suspicions about the value, in terms of genre, of such things, and I
knew that we would face many technical difficulties and expenses doing
one quickly, so I suggested strongly that we put movies on disc first,
and that we develop an authoring system, an interface, that we work with
Hollywood labs, etc. There
were some good guys who supported our efforts, so we got to do the
project and run it, and the rest is history."

>> Wednesday, November 21, 2007

It's wednesday again which means we'll continue with our road to find the best game on CD-i. Last week The Lost Ride was at a lone height and this is the game you voted to the finish! This week again we welcome you to vote for the best cd-i title. You can vote for 1 or more favourites! Every week we'll spawn a new poll in the left column of this blog: Be quick as the vote limit is only seven days! After the closing day we'll post the results in each catagory post and in the end of December 2007 we'll be back with the final decision to mark "The Best CD-i Game of 2007". I hope you'll all have fun and enjoy CD-i as much as we do! Read on for this weeks nominees:

Starting Date: November 21
End Date: November 28

This week we'll continue with all Interactive Cartoons released on CD-i. The nominees for "Best Game" are:

Escape from Cybercity
The Earth is under attack. The evil Guardian's Forces are in control. Only a few continue to resist and only a you can help. Your mission is to survive the dangers of CyberCity. Fight you war to the train and destroy the Guardian's planet. Beware: Things are not what they seem... Escape From CyberCity is the first CD-interactive action adventure to utilize full-cel animation, giving the player the feel of starring in a fast action motion picture. This beautifully animated production features a dynamic, high impact soundtrack and complete interactive play.

Brain Dead 13
After the initial success of Dragon's Lair creating the Full Motion Video Adventure genre for video games its successor and spin-offs including Space Ace offered little innovation to the gameplay. As a late arrival Brain Dead 13 reworked the genre with a simple refreshing approach, infinite lives and multiple ways to die! This addition to the games mechanic removed the frustration typically associated with these games and served up a fun and varied gaming experience. See the boxout below for a few examples of the multiple deaths and resurrections inflicted upon the games hero Lance Galahad pushing the boundaries of cartoon violence to the limit!

Dragon's Lair
The lovely Princess Daphne has been kidnapped by the evil wizard Mordroc. She's been whisked away to be placed in the charge of a wicked fire breathing Dragon called Singe. You must lead Dirk, our hapless hero, through Mordroc's castle. Help Dirk defeat the monsters lurking in every room. The ultimate challege lies in the Dragon's Lair. Outmanoeuvre the Wizard, defeat the Dragon and rescue the princess before it's too late!

Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp
Having tried to lose Dirk in the Dragon's Lair, the evil wizard Mordroc strikes again, kidnapping Princess Daphne to a wrinkle in time. Join Dirk and his Time Machine in hot and hilarious pursuit. Defeat the Wizard or Daphne will be lost forever.

Space Ace
Ace, Earth's greatest hero, is being attacked by the evil commander Borf. Borf has just kidnapped the beautiful Kimberley, and is plotting to take over the planet Earth with the help of his dreaded weapon - the Infanto Ray. Only you can guide Ace through treacherous battles to destroy the Infanto Ray, save Earth and rescue Kimberley. Be valiant, space warrior, the fate of Earth is in your hands!

Interactive Dreams thanks everyone from the CD-i Community to keep CD-i alive!

>> Monday, November 19, 2007

John Szczepaniak got the chance to interview the creator of the two first Zelda CD-i titles. Dale DeSharone: "I just sort of fell into it by accident. In 1987 I moved from Northern California to Boston, Massachusetts, to help build a CDi team for Spinnaker Software. Spinnaker had a deal with Philips to produce seven launch titles. I eventually became manager of the development group. I had originally planned to be at Spinnaker only one year as Philips was planning to release the machine in 1988. That one year turned into four, due to constant delays with the hardware emulation systems and the operating system. It was dreadfully slow and severely limited what was possible. If you look at the scrolling in Link or Zelda you'll see that you can only scroll about 2 or 2.5 screens horizontally. This was dictated by the video memory available.

It was just obviously not a game system and Philips was actually very clear in telling us that they didn't believe the market for this device was games. There was a subtle hostility toward games that I noticed from the upper echelon of execs at AIM (American Interactive Media... Philips' CDi software publishing arm). Philips thought that people would buy the machine for home educational purposes. This all changed after the launch of the CDi platform because the only titles that actually sold were the game titles. After the launch of Spinnaker's seven CDi titles I left the company. Spinnaker did not have plans to continue CDi development. I chose to start a new development company and was able to get development funding from AIM. Most of the CDi team from Spinnaker left to join this new group.

This is where the Link and Zelda story begins. Somehow, Philips got a deal with Nintendo to license 5 characters. As I understood the arrangement it wasn't a license of five games but 5 characters. A number of developers pitched AIM with ideas. I think AIM chose to go with the biggest names that Nintendo had at the time. We pitched separate ideas for a game starring Link and a separate one with Zelda. The development budgets were not high. As I recall they were perhaps around $600,000 each. We made a pitch that we could maximize the quality of the games by combining the funding to develop only one game engine that would be used by both games. This was in 1991-92 and even at this time a U.S. technical employee cost about $100,000 per year to support (salary, taxes, office space, equipment, insurance, administration costs). This was also a time when a 1GB hard drive cost $3000. We had a team of three programmers (other than myself), one audio engineer/composer, four artists and a producer. We had a single freelance writer who wrote the scripts and helped design both games.

We had just left Spinnaker, we had a new group of people, so we were creating an office in Cambridge. At the same time we had this group of animators in a couple of apartments. As I recall I would be going back and forth from the office in Cambridge, working with programmers, working to build the engine, back to the animators, going through the script and teaching them the process of how they were going to get the animation done. Also, hiring the U.S. based artists who were working on the game artwork itself. We had, maybe just a little over a year to produce them. So it was pretty tight.

We created the music in our studio. Our composer was Tony Trippi, [He spells it out], who had worked with me at Spinnaker and then came on board, and worked with me at the new company. So he created all the music for both games. We were working on the games simultaneously, so we were working on the script, on the design and the artwork, and the animation to both games at the same time. Of course, we auditioned local union actors, AFTRA [American Federation of Television and Radio Artists] actors, and chose the voices for the game. There's about 10 minutes of cinema in each game, so there was a fair amount of audio to edit.

AIM was of course expecting some type of full-motion animation in the games and I was trying to figure out how we were going to do that on the budgets. A mutual friend put me in touch with Igor Razboff. Igor was also interested in starting a new technical company at this time (1991). He had a PHD in Higher Mathematics and Computer Science from the university in St. Petersburg, Russia. He had been in the U.S. for twelve years and had worked at Bell Labs and Computer Vision. The Perestroika was beginning and the Berlin Wall was coming down. Igor wanted to return to St. Petersburg for the first time in twelve years and build a company there that would provide some type of service to U.S. companies.

We came up with the design for Philips and then...Did you ever look at the other Zelda game, that the different developer produced? They went with a very different type of design look. No, Nintendo's only input was we ran the design document and character sketches past them for their approval. They were mostly interested in the look of the Link and Zelda characters. I think the Link and Zelda characters were in somewhat of a formation stage back then. Because really, the characters didn't appear very detailed in the Nintendo game. They were mainly visible, you know, on the box covers. (Author's note: I believe he was referring to the Japanese box art, which featured character designs, in comparison to the low resolution graphics found in-game on the NES). And Philips, they didn't have a lot of input into the design either. One of your questions was why we didn't go with the top down, and I think Philips would never have approved that. Because they would have thought that looked old, and wasn't making use of the CDi capabilities. If Philips had seen a top down design, they would have said that it didn't... They would have looked at it just visually, as opposed to gameplay. And that was what they were most concerned with. Does the CDi game look visually different from other game or computer systems, and are we making less use of the graphics? The possibility that the top down might have been more fun for gameplay, wouldn't have affected them. So we definitely pushed for the side view.

What came from Nintendo... of course the two Nintendo games that had come previously from Nintendo, and um... Then box art from Nintendo in terms of the design of the characters, and booklet artwork. Otherwise there wasn't anything that came from Nintendo. Yeah, we had been aware of criticism following the release of the games. I can understand that people were disappointed, I think probably in terms of... I guess they made comments about animation, but also in terms of gameplay and design. Given the amount of time we had, and what we were creating at the time in terms of company infrastructure, I thought we did a good job. You know, we weren't Nintendo."

With great thanks to Dale Desharone, John Szczepaniak, Devin and all the others involved to bring this interview to the CD-i Community.

>> Sunday, November 18, 2007

New advertising posters to me, this was in a USA published ad featuring the CD-i 910, and the software titles available around 1991. Impressing detail is an official box shot of DEJA VU which was never officially released on CD-i. Considering they only create the boxart when a game is actually finished, I get a warm feeling Deja Vu was more than just a design-alfa on CD-i. This picture was part of a big poster that I posted earlier today. It features a tiger promoting the 'power' of CD-i, I like the use of it, and I'm sure you haven't seen it before. Meanwhile, find more CD-i posters here.

By coincidence this picture of original Philips Air purifiers arrived in my mailbox thanks to Wim. Like this one, these we're used in stores to promote several Philips products, by showing this demonstration disc in a CD-i touchscreen kiosk, the ones you see in this CD-i collection. It's the advantage of being a large company, so you can use your own technology to promote the other. This one was a dutch version, but undoubtly there are other languages and also from other products as well. It's just that these kind of discs don't surface that often, but it's nice to remember the extra value of CD-i as used in stores, and not just as an entertainment machine ;)

>> Saturday, November 17, 2007

Talking about games that actually do exist on CD-i but nobody ever played, Alfapet falls in this catagory being a swedisch regional release. Just like other words-games like the dutch 'Lingo' or America's 'Text Tiles' you'll only appreciate this title when you actually know the local language. The producer, Adatek, is also unknown to us so I'd like to know whether they did more for CD-i rather than just this game. I've never seen it on ebay though, so it's probably rare! Anyway, the regional home doesn't make it too playable for the whole community, but we're all hunting down rare CD-i titles, right? The multiplayer option is pushing the replay value though, and playing this with three friends is definately fun!

>> Friday, November 16, 2007

A long-time favorite for other systems, the CD-i version of Micro Machines by Codemasters brings all its cartridge-based assets to the CD format with virtually no added features. And that's the way we like it. The idea is simple -- take miniature race cars and drive them around the dream tracks a six-year-old might think up on a particularly inventive rainy day. Formula-One cars race around the rails of a billiards table, whizzing around balls and into the pockets... mini-speedboats power around the bathtub, jumping over bars of soap and bottles of shampoo... dune buggies zip around a sandbox, cutting turns in front of sand castles and jumping over mini-moats. The action is equally-streamlined: players see a top down view of the playfield that scrolls along with the action, using the touchpad to turn the car clockwise or counter-clockwise. Take out the scrolling and it's the 20-year old arcade classic "Sprint", or the "Spinout" game that shipped with the old Magnavox/Philips "Odyssey2".

In short, it's a game that takes about 30 seconds to learn, and three hours to beat. If you're really good. Standing in your way is a cast of characters of varying skills. You choose one as your driver, and must beat the rest on 36 wacky tracks. Finish first or second in a four-person race and you advance to the next race; fail and you lose a life and must race the same track again. Beat a computer player enough times and he or she is forced to resign.

Fortunately, speed isn't your only ally in Micro Machines. It's also fair game to bump, rear end, cut off, or otherwise harass the computer's cars. In fact, such techniques are virtually necessary, since at least one of the computer cars will always be naturally faster than you... an advantage that can be negated with a proper bump right near the edge of the table, the side of the water, or other appropriately lethal traps.

The above applies to the one-player ''challenge'' game, which is the superior play-mode. With two players, or one easily-amused player, you can also race ''head to head''. These races put just two cars on the track -- the goal is to get so far ahead of the other player that he falls off the screen. Do this enough times and you'll win the race, even if you haven't finished a lap. But this mode isn't as satisfying, since sharp turns that go from horizontal to vertical scrolling make it extremely easy to get a screen-ful ahead.

Micro Machines is a near-perfect 16-bit cartridge game, one which realizes its modest goals with class, and the CD adaptation doesn't mess with success. The only addition are some short, choppy, 3-D animations that establish the location of each race. Scrolling and control on the CD-i aren't as refined as in other versions, but are at least adequate.

One annoyance is the lack of the now-standard means for advanced players to skip earlier levels. Micro Machines has no passwords, no codes, no entry in the CD-i player's memory, nada. If you're having trouble with the 31st race, you'll have to play through the previous thirty, every game, just to try again. It may improve the game's shelf-life, but the preliminary races get tedious quickly, and for a game that will take hours to complete, it's questionable whether players will hang in long enough to play the game through.

Despite that, Micro Machines is a rare thing: a sprite-based action game for the CD-i. It's a fresh breath of simplicity and speed on a platform better known for ponderous puzzles and distended adventure quests. Assuming you've already played the best action game for CD-i, The Apprentice, Micro Machines deserves a spot on your shelf. The machines may be miniscule, but the catchy game-play is no small accomplishment.

>> Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Wednesday has arrived again and that means we're continuing our road to the best CD-i game of all-time. Last week we went on voting for the best adventure game, and it was the first surprising contest as Burn:Cycle didn't win! I really thought this was going to be your favourite, especially because it's one of the most well-known CD-i titles out there. But no, you voted for The 7th Guest which I think is better thanks to the outstanding Digital Video support and the creepy story-telling. This week again we welcome you to vote for the best cd-i title. It's my favourite genre this week! I got some complaints about the FMV titles not being 3D. Yeah, that's a bit tricky, but they're certainly not 2D. It's just they're not animated 3D, just 'real' 3D. This time you'll be able to vote for FMV games in a different poll, so they're out of this one. More polls, it's already extravagant! You can vote for 1 or more favourites! Every week we'll spawn a new poll in the left column of this blog: Look at the left column to find the current poll! Be quick as the vote limit is only seven days! After the closing day we'll post the results in each catagory post and in the end of December 2007 we'll be back with the final decision to mark "The Best CD-i Game of 2007". I hope you'll all have fun and enjoy CD-i as much as we do! Read on for this weeks nominees:

Starting Date: November 14
End Date: November 21

This week we'll continue with all 3D Shooting games released on CD-i. The nominees for "Best Game" are:

Mystic Midway 2 - Phantom Express
This shooting gallery is a companion to the best-selling Mystic Midway: Rest in Pieces. This time the game takes you for some real ups and downs on a roller coaster ride through dark tunnels and a carnival fun house--with targets when you least expect them.

Thunder in Paradise
"You're in the middle of an action-packed adventure with your cohorts Spence (Terry ""Hulk"" Hogan) and Bru (Chris Lemmon). Blast your way through three mind-blowing action encounters as you attempt to rescue Spence's daughter Jessica, regain control of the M.A.J.O.R., and crush your arch enemy Rampike. Race ate hyperspeed through the Caribbean, aboard Thunder, a 45-foot piece of high-tech marine hardware. Take control of the boat's weapon systems and defend Thunder from a shower of deadly threats. Face down minions of the psychotic Rampike on the eerie trails of Rossiter's Island. Go toe-to-toe with the M.A.J.O.R., a bio-humanoid gone haywire, in a battle for Jessica's life!"

Creature Shock
We have no idea what's out there but whatever it is, it isn't friendly. Take no chances: shoot anything that moves. It took Argonaut 3 years to cram this double CD full of stunningly rendered 3D environments. Play this eerie, creepie game at night with the lights out and your headphones on, if you dare!!!

Atlantis: The Last Resort
"The parole officer has just made you an offer you cannot refuse... ""Shut down the reactor at the heart of the Atlantis resort and you can have your freedom"". Your reply... ""Where's my rocket launcher?"" 20 levels of mindless blasting!!"

The Lost Ride
The Lost Ride is a Roller Coaster Game where you have to try and escape from an evil Maze while avoiding broken tracks, bombed tunnels, enemy carts and attacking creatures. Each maze is a beautiful pre-rendered (seamless jumps) ride, with sprite action shoot-em-up. There are 3 thematic worlds with random mazes and bonus rides: Mine World, Aqua World and Future World. Beating the ""boss"" creatures, thus escaping from a maze will drop you into a crazy bonus ride with surround sound and various decision points. The mazes are different every time you play.

Solar Crusade
Solar Crusade is a ballistic shoot-em-up which will take you through stunning settings from the far-flung corners of the galaxy to the very heart of the Earth itself. Board your craft for a perilous and fantastic journey through a world which is modelled entirely in 3D using Silicon Graphics workstations.

Kether
You are Melkhor, Galactic Knight of Light. You have been chosen to save the Princess of Wisdom from the evil forces of Khork. Enoy, Emperor of Light, will guide you as you fight the powerful laser artillery of Hod, battle the killer vessels of Gebourah and defeat the Dark Knights of the Temples.

Chaos Control
You have been chosen to repel the attacks of the Kesh Rhan extra-terrestrials who are threatening Earth. In command of a spacefighter you will travel through universes in full screen synthesized images, going from the island of Manhattan to the heart of a virtual reality computer, reaching ultimately the pitfalls of outer space. Quick, take the controls, there is not a minute to be wasted.

Interactive Dreams thanks everyone from the CD-i Community to keep CD-i alive!

>> Monday, November 12, 2007

Let's have a chat about the new developments CD-i Emulator has gone through in the last year. While we all know the latest available public release is still version 0.52, author cdifan will be busy with his project for a long time. As some CD-i members sound desperate for new updates, cdifan can be sure about the popularity of his emulator of this obscure system! Although I don't think we were ever under much of an illusion about CD-i Emulator. It was going to serve a die-hard core contingent of CD-i fanatics anyway. Yet, I look forward to the day when CD-i Emulator offers increased compatibility and additional features, hopefully expanding the emulators user base. The demo offered by cdifan allows users to trial whatever CD-i software they have before purchasing the unlimited product. So I hope they know what the emulator offers! Recently the author of CD-i Emulator, cdifan, opened the gate a little and talked about what happened so far. Question: How about the current situation around emulation of the Digital Video Cartridge?

cdifan: "I have basic register and data decoding working for two of the three DVC models out there (GMPEG, VMPEG, IMPEG) and am getting the MPEG data streams from the drivers. But they need to be decoded and properly merged with the standard audio/video streams of the CD-i player. Video decoding is difficult because the hardware uses a "push" model instead of the "pull" model used by most existing codecs. This can be solved but it requires some pre-decoding and buffering trickery. Video merging is likewise difficult because the drivers expect to control the frame buffering directly, using a hardware frame fifo (in YUV format) with over half a dozen registers per stage, not all of which I understand yet. And let's not even speak about all the slow motion, jumping, seeking and synchronisation issues that also need to be solved eventually. Audio is much easier to handle but somewhat pointless without the video counterpart. I know of only a single game that would benefit from MPEG audio without MPEG video (can anyone guess?)."

Question: How about the implementation of keyboard support in CD-i Emulator? cdifan: "Believe me, I am aware that keyboard support is the most wanted feature for CD-i Emulator. But it's not as easy as you might think, especially since the original structure of that piece of code has turned out to be a bad design in view of the differences in pointing device handling between the various player models. I did some work on the Goldstar and CD-i 370 players recently and that has uncovered yet another set of misfeatures in that design..."

Update:"I have already explained that this particular bit of code has indeed become badly structured by too many adaptations to specification changes. It needs refactoring and I don't feel like investing feature time until that is done. And even then it certainly wouldn't take 10 minutes, a whole evening looks more like it, considering the number of configurations and test scenarios."

Pushing the boundaries CD-i member Nitrosoxide knows what he would like to see in the new CD-i Emulator version, additionally to the known CD-i Emulator wannahaves:1. A more advanced Mouse Cursor Interface"While the mouse interface of CD-i Emulator is useable, there are definitely major glitches. When the emulator is active with a game the computer mouse is only able to function within the emulator. By this I mean that you often can’t use your computer mouse to click outside the emulation screen, it's “trapped”. Nor can you click the emulator menus (File, Emulate, Decode, Window, Options, Help)."2. Better Full Screen Support"While Full Screen Support is definitely implemented, it doesn’t make the Windows Taskbar disappear. Nor can you have an experience (even by pulling down the taskbar) where the entire screen is 100% CD-i since the CD-i Emulator does have a button toolbar which I don’t think you can get rid of."3. Different Display Support"After hearing the CD-i supported SCART and so and so, I’d really like to see how much the platform can be pushed to get the best display possible. Currently with CD-i Emulator I hook it up to my widescreen HDTV through the computers' VGA port. Nintendo’s virtual console and xbox live seems to do a good job of displaying older games in 480p."4. Emulation directly from CD"Honestly the main reason for this, is that there are plenty of CD-i games, that are notoriously difficult to make a playable image out of. I Indeed spent about a year working on trying to get a suitable copy of The Apprentice, which is unfortunate since its probably one of the best games on the system."

cdifan elaborates on this last issue: "On a PC, getting data from a CD-i disc requires "raw" read techniques which differ greatly accross drives and drivers (read: Windows versions); I could never spend the amount of time on this that the authors of e.g. IsoBustor or CloneCD have. Some CD drives don't support reading CD-i or CD Ready discs at all, anyway; there is just no way that CD-i Emulator could fix this. And there are also emulation timing issues that can only be fixed by using "read-ahead" which quite possibly requires making CD-i Emulator multithreaded..."

Cdifan's update:"Mundane (to me) tasks like keyboard support will tend to get postponed until they are the only thing holding up a shiny new release. And that needs one or more somewhat major features or bugfixes; several of them are in the works but none are even near being finished. Of course, I also tend to somewhat underrate the importance of this particular feature: most games are much much nicer to play with either a joystick (which CD-i Emulator does support, albeit somewhat clumsily) or the mouse (which it supports quite well, I think). Open sourcing the emulator might fix part of the problem, but it certainly wouldn't help with the core emulation issues as nobody that I've had contact with seems to have the required in-depth technical knowledge of the CD-i system or even the drive to get it. That would tend to limit the contributions to the outer fringes of the project and thereby put more constraints on the core work."

Spamming about upcoming CD-i games was the last thing I could think of when we started Interactive Dreams two years ago. And yet it's the second game, after Frog Feast, and according to programmer Charles Doty it won't be the last either! Other CD-i websites are sleeping apparently, while there's a lot going on within the CD-i community! Charles about his new CD-i game "Connaone": "I got a step closer last night, as I was able to verify that my sprite compiler was generating working data. This should make any additional games a lot faster, or I can draw more objects. I've got a few more ideas to tie into the sprite compiler, which should squeeze out a little more performance. And, I'm just warming up. Frog Feast wasn't optimized at the level it really needed to be. Hopefully Connaone will be a lot more optimized. I get the feeling it will need to be to run well." If you want to have a peek at the upcoming CD-i game, Charles uploaded a demo of Connaone CD-i in its current raw state, download it here and burn it on a CDR using Discjuggler and try it on your CD-i player for free, or just use CD-i Emulator!

>> Sunday, November 11, 2007

When your CD-i player fails to start playing a disc and keeps giving you error messages chances are high your Timekeeper battery is empty. Unfortunately Philips manufactured CD-i players in a way it's no easy task to replace a simple battery, but handymans like us are not scared away by a little mechanics. Together with a few CD-i members some pictures are available to locate the Battery in a Philips CD-i 210 player. This is exact the same player as the CD-i 200 which was released under the Magnavox brand (100% Philips). Interactive Dreams improved the material available on the locked "Le Monde du CD-i" website and later on Terratrons own Technical Archive. So now you have a better look at the CD-i player' inside view. Additional help on how to replace the battery you can find in our tutorial right here.

Follow the pictures one by one and especially look at the parts coded on your player: The timekeeper is called "M48T08-150PCI". Basic instructions from Le Monde du CD-i: "Step 1. First open up the case, then remove the video cartridge and the video cartridge compound, remove the cd-drive and disconnect all connectors from the main PCB. Remove the screws holding the PCB and its connectors (at the back of the player SCART, Controller port etc…). Now you can remove the Main PCB. Behind the SCART connector (in the CDI 210) you can find the Timekeeper Ram M48T08-150PCI."

Terratron continues: "This 8 kb memory chip has a Lithium battery onboard and this battery holds the memory. If this battery is getting a little old like a year or 10 then the problems begin, losing your high scores and even failing to play some disks or locking up the system (I had a problem with Earth Command not starting and other titles not playing well!). Also a well know failure caused by the Timekeeper is when you start your CD-i player it's starting up in the storage screen saying that the NVRAM is full...."

Step 2. Disconnecting the old battery. He continues: "In the cap of the Timekeeper Ram is the xtal and the battery and they are connected with wires to the M48T08. We can not open the cap so we must drill a hole into the Timekeeper to get to the battery wires. I used a 4mm drill to make the wires visible. Do this very slowly till u see the 2 wires. You can measure the voltage from the old battery between the two wires. We have to disconnect the plus wire from the battery. I used a 0.5mm drill to do this. Just drill trough the right (+) wire and if it's disconnected right you measure no voltage between the two wires anymore."

Step 3. Connecting a new battery. Terratron: "As a new battery I used a 3 Volt Lithium cell used on pc-motherboards and I also use a holder to place the battery in. If the battery fails in the future you can replace it easily with a new one. Solder some wires to the battery holder and just connect the +3v to the right (cut) wire and connect the -0v to the left wire. You can put some (hot) glue into the drilled hole so the wires can't get loose easily. The battery and its holder can easily be placed on top of the Timekeeper with some glue."

Finally, put everything back together. If you did it right, the Timekeeper battery has been replaced succesfully! More detailed instructions here. Remember, Gametronik's Topxicemu promised working on a new CD-i Repair Guide with improved pictures. Whenever this material might reach us, we hope to find inside pictures of other CD-i player types as well. As the 210 is basically a stripped down version of the CD-i 220, the PCB board is basically the same and the Timekeepr is on the same location.

Thanks to: Terratron (for the instructions and pictures, I hope he will return for more support!) and James (more pictures)

Every CD-i disc has a printed text box on the bottom of the boxart claiming: "This disc is fully compatible with every CD-i player displaying this symbol" (with an image right next to it of CD-i). However, recently we've seen some problems regarding a few titles like Family Games 2 which actually do have some problems on different TV formats. But what about Video-CD's? They also are coded PAL (European TV standard) or NTSC (USA TV standard), and what was the difference again? In theory any digitally encoded video recording, whether on tape or disc, can be replayed on any machine, anywhere in the world. The coded information -- basically numbers -- should be the same wherever the disc or tape is mastered, the conversion to local TV standards takes place inside the player or VCR. The reality is somewhat different, as we have already seen with some CDi releases; there are considerable variations in PAL and NTSC originated recordings that show up on replay.

Some -- like reduced picture height -- are merely annoying, others like deliberately or accidentally introduced coding differences can make discs from one country unplayable in another. We’ve come a long way in twenty years, but not so far that we will be able to watch anything we like, unless the powers that be permit it.

Cdifan elaborates: "Although there are some single-standard discs around (mainly professional titles, I think), most CD-i discs are dual-standard: they play on either PAL or NTSC units. The only difference between "US" and "European" versions of most discs is the packaging, the bits on them are often identical. Some players (CD-i 60x, 3xx) can be switched between PAL and NTSC, but that primarily affects the standard of the video output signal. You would need a dual-standard TV or monitor to handle this (lots of modern TVs do, at least here in Europe). If you can, stay away from the so-called Roboco and Mono-II models, these are known to have problems with some discs. You can use the Comparison table of all Philips and Philips-build consumer CD-i players to check specific player models; off the top of my head the "bad" models are the CD-i 200/20, 210/20, 220/40 and 450.

For compatibility purposes I would prefer the Philips CD-i 490, because it has the same 68070 processor as most other Philips players (the LG GDI 700 uses an 68341). The 490 also supports a splitter to use two pointing devices and a serial device (modem); I don't know of the 700 supports two pointing devices? Spare parts for the 490 may also be somewhat easier to find... Other than the above I don't think there's much difference, both players have 32KB of NVRAM and include a DV cartridge."

>> Friday, November 9, 2007

What if Philips entered the videogames market for a second time after the first CD-i adventure? You wouldn't believe this chance was pretty real, and several contacts were available between Philips and Argonaut to build a chip for CD-i 2. When that turned out to be too expensive for Philips, they did another try collaborating with 3DO who were also having a hard time succeeding in the videogames market. Anyway, Philips President Boonstra cut all costs in their Media division so every new videogames/media plan was shelved. After all those years there are still only a few hints at all those promising plans that never came out.

Inside people were also hinting at an upgrade of the Digital Video Cartridge that should be able to run 3D games, but I never found anyone who could elaborate on this subject. It would mean a different version of the DVC, something like a graphics acceleration cartridge which could be plugged in the same extension port as the current DVC cart. Anyway, it never happened. Many sources close to CD-i who were also full of belief in the format were confident that when Philips had the guts they would be able to show Sony the world. Again, this is ofcourse pure speculation!

In 1995 there were many investigations and debates by Philips about the future plans of their gaming business. All came to nothing after various stages of Research and Development. The core business lines were active in both The Netherlands (Eindhoven) and UK (Redhill, London). Unfortunately CD-i was not a commercial success and it wasn't generating money for new investments. The first goal when developing a follow-up to CD-i was to strengthen the 3D performance (many people recognised that "multimedia" was more about games than anything else) so it could become a games console. However Philips overall decided that the games market (then dominated by Nintendo and Sega, those were even pre-Playstation days) was too expensive to enter. It is very possible that Philips in 1995 did not have the resources (financial, technical, managerial, marketing, games software etc) to make it a success. The company was still turning itself around in those days.

However, this is what an anonymous source told us: "The second gen CD-i player was looking at using an arm processor and we used Argonaut at point, to help spec it out (Jez San being the principle there) out of the UK. Then later we looked at doing work with 3DO and Philips met with them up at their offices on a couple of occasions."

Moreover, Argonaut's Jez San confirms the developments on "CD-i 2": "Argonaut worked closely with Nintendo during the early years of the NES and SNES. Argonaut was fundamental in developing the Super FX Chip for the SNES, which was used in Star Fox. Back then, in the early 90’s, the Super FX chip was the world’s best selling RISC microprocessor-- outselling the ARM and MIPS chips by millions in those years. It was only when the PlayStation came out in the mid 90’s that we got beaten on RISC sales. The entire 3D acceleration market that NVidia and ATI now dominate, Argonaut was there first and we’ve got the patents to prove it. After we built the Super FX chip for Nintendo, we went on to design a chip for Philips for a videogame machine that never came out (codenamed GreenPiece aka CD-I 2)."

Devin elaborates on the existence of the "CD-i 2": "Jez said the same thing to me years ago when I was interviewing him about Starfox 2. Although he recalled the chips codename as 'Project Greensleeves'! Then again he admitted the memory was hazy in this respect so I guess we can let him off. This information was previously released in the RetroGamer issue that covered CD-i. Unfortunately the knowledge seemed somewhat sparse on the CD-i 2 GPU."

Atari plays an important role in the cycle of CD-i and they hold all the former Philips Media rights since Philips sold its CD-i business to Infogrames. Infogrames renamed its company to Atari in 2003. After delay Atari published its first quarter report of their 'broken' financial year which ended June 30. Here it shows Atari lost 11.9 million dollar in these three months. One year before the loss was 7.3 million dollar. Atari claims to be unsure about its own future. The former Infogrames which was partly in hands of Philips has a hard time in the videogames market.

Welcome to CD-i!

Welcome to the wonderful world of Interactive Dreams. You've just come to a warmhearted place all dedicated to the Philips CD-i. With attention to detail and quality, 2015 should see the rise of CD-i as a Retrogaming platform. For many CD-i has gone as a relative obscurity had it not been for the intervention of websites like The Black Moon Project and Interactive Dreams. Hopefully we're doing our bit to set the record straight along with all the other great CD-i projects.

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Do you have tips on what to post about CD-i? Can you help us with screenshots, videos or reviews? We'd love it when you share it with us! Please email us at interactive [dot] dreams [at] gmail [dot] com, thanks in advance!